It’s easy to get caught up in the chaos of the digital marketing sphere. There are many paths to go down when utilizing influencer marketing strategies, and finding which best fits your brand can be challenging. Fortunately, almost 20 years ago, the birth of the influencer agency occurred, changing the course of the industry forever.
The Basics
For those unfamiliar with the term, an influencer marketing agency works directly with brands to design, run and optimize their influencer marketing campaigns on social media. These agencies’ roles in supporting the brand’s marketing campaign can differ depending on how much involvement the brand would like them to have. For example, some agencies can run the whole show, whereas some can merely advise brands on what the most beneficial path for them would be.
Even today, there is still a huge knowledge gap in how brands perceive and use influencer marketing, one that agencies can close. However, the first step is knowing what to look for when selecting an agency to work with.
Here are a few key aspects to consider when partnering with your first influencer marketing agency.
Do They Have Relevant Experience?
Many agencies now have considerably impressive portfolios of previous work. An excellent place to start would be by asking potential agencies for relevant case studies in your industry that reflect your desired outcome. From here, you can shortlist agencies and decide who would be worth having deeper conversations with.
Influencer Selection Criteria?
Before the technology had been produced, influencers were selected purely because they created content that fell within a certain category. Advanced filtering systems were non-existent.
Today, analyzing the specific makeup of an influencer’s audience is vital to ensuring that it overlaps with that of your brand, and analyzing the influencer’s content itself, lessens the risk of pairing a brand with an over-saturated creator, concludes whether their language is brand-safe or not and sees whether they have mentioned any brand competitors in the past.
Today “brand-fit” is no longer acceptable.
Content Evaluation Criteria
Content should be evaluated based on its organic performance. This means how many likes, comments, shares, and saves it has garnered. Ask your potential agencies how they measure the success of content. Of course, nine times out of 10, they will say their measurements are based on organic performance, but if they do not, you have every right to ask why or even put your own two cents in and discuss alternative options; after all, you are the client.
What’s Their Targeting Strategy?
Organic influencer content reaches a subset of an influencer’s followers, typically around 9%, depending on the social media platform.
What is your agency doing to ensure that 9% of the content reaches the target audience? It is not enough for an agency to find, brief, and manage influencers for a brand anymore.
How Do They Measure The Results?
A basic and essential question to ask potential agencies is how they count impressions of the content. Neither reach nor engagement correlates with sales, so measuring impressions is insufficient. What business metrics can the agency measure beyond these metrics? Many are available nowadays, and we highly recommend choosing an agency that can offer these.
Guaranteed Results
And finally, is there work guaranteed to produce results? Not only this but what are they specifically guaranteeing you? While guaranteeing is extremely difficult in most agency relationships, influencer marketing agencies should be able to promise specific outcomes around actual views, engagement, or web traffic.
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